The term “early modern” is sometimes deployed to indicate a
bounded and distinct span of human history. This alterist approach
to periodization emphasizes that whatever span of years the term
brackets will be understood to differ substantially from the
centuries that precede and follow. Or “early modern” might signify
a commencement, the time during which institutions, epistemologies,
and subjectivities familiar today found their first articulation
and burgeoned, an inaugurative and continuist mode of temporal
partitioning. Though in critical practice these temporal frames
tend to blend quietly into each other, neither serves the period
very well—and not simply because both begin by abjecting the Middle
Ages. Medievalists learned long ago that when you carve your
scholarly habitation out of time’s wilderness of flux and declare
this secure home exclusively yours, you may as well have retreated
to the monastery. Or, if instead of attempting to live apart from
modernity you enter its conversations by insisting that “All your
base are belong to us” (or AYBABTU, as the kids write)—that it all
started c. 750 or 1200 or 1500 or whatever—you will be the person
in the corner attempting to be cool by citing old Internet memes
while really just giving those nearby an excuse to step quietly
away.

In this position piece I will offer a few words about each
approach, alterist and continuist. Both are as familiar in medieval
as they are they are in early modern studies. Tracing the results
of happy accidents (the Middle Ages carries a strange designation
its scholars did not choose) and complicated self-nominations (the
Renaissance became the Early Modern period through internal
retitling), I will argue for polychronic approaches that allow for
difference and change but do not swerve into stark discontinuity.
Medievalists did not opt to be in the middle, but as it turns out
mediality provides some surprisingly handy tools for thinking about
time outside of linearity. “Early modern” has so much incipience
built into the term that difficulty inheres in moving toward the
nonteleological and nonprogressive frames that various periods
christened with a “post-” have accomplished.

Derived from the Latin word modo (“ just now”),
modern demarcates a temporal break as well as a
changed way of being, a distinct mode of cultural and subjective
existence. If time is a forward-moving line, then “early modern” is
in the alterist framework an autonomous segment cut from that
vector and stabilized into self-containment. The detritus of a
surpassed history will, of course, remain visible, as will some
seeds of a future to come (early modern intimates a
more modern modernity yet to arrive), but when time is cut into
supersessionary periodizations each section of history will also
stand as fairly discrete.1 Each well-delineated
temporal expanse must then be approached through the precision of
historicism, with its insistence upon the contextual and relational
determination of meaning. At its worst, historicism’s discontinuist
method of interpretation can freeze a period into
stasis.2 Historicist pronouncements of inherent
rigor and the singularity of truth have made life rather difficult,
for example, for feminists, queers, those who believe a text might
demonstrate a temporal heterogeneity irreducible to inscription of
the present, or those who hold that no temporal moment owns a total
ethos. Newer historicisms may be friendlier to scholars who once
had been outliers, but historicism is in its foundational acts
exclusionary. The early modern is not medieval, and so a great deal
of what becomes legible or earns the esteemed label of “emergent”
is going to depend upon what gets sloughed into the Middle Ages.
Dissolving text into context or human subjectivity into
disciplinary discourses is also, in the end, a rather impoverished
way of apprehending how a work works. As Graham Harman
has recently written of New Historicism and its “fiesta of
interactivity” (192), relational readings of texts imagine that
works are exhaustible through emplacement into context. Yet, like
any object, a text holds reserves of un-plumbed relations that
ensure its resistant vitality.

Arguing for the absolute difference of one’s time period is also
an excellent way of requesting that those outside its parameters
ignore work conducted within. Why enter a conversation with
someone...

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